Volume 2 / Book 4 — BOOK IV THE PLAY-HOUSES

XVI INTRODUCTION: THE PUBLIC THEATRES

[Bibliographical Note.—Some notes in the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1813–16 by Eu. Hood [Joseph Haslewood] are reprinted in The Gentleman’s Magazine Library, xv (1904), 86, and in Roxburghe Revels (ed. J. Maidment, 1837). J. P. Collier, History of English Dramatic Poetry, iii. 79, has An Account of the Old Theatres of London, and chronological sections on the subject are in F. G. Fleay, A Chronicle History of the London Stage (1890). T. F. Ordish, Early London Theatres (1894), covers the Shoreditch and Bankside theatres ‘in the Fields’ other than the Globe; a companion volume on the urban houses has never appeared. The Bankside houses are also dealt with by W. Rendle, The Bankside, Southwark, and the Globe (1877), being Appendix I to F. J. Furnivall, Harrison’s Description of England, Part II (N. Sh. Soc.), and in Old Southwark and its People (1878) and The Play-houses at Bankside in the Time of Shakespeare (Walford’s Antiquarian, 1885, vii. 207, 274; viii. 55). J. Q. Adams, Shakespearean Play-houses (1917), is a comprehensive and valuable work, which reached me when this chapter was practically complete. I am glad to find that our results so generally agree. The chief London maps have been reproduced by the London Topographical Society and on a smaller scale by G. E. Mitton, Maps of Old London (1908). Some are also given as illustrations in G. P. Baker, The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist (1907). They are classified by W. Martin, A Study of Early Map-Views of London in The Antiquary, xlv (1909), 337, 406, and their evidence for the Bankside analysed by the same writer, with partial reproductions, in The Site of the Globe Play-house of Shakespeare (1910, Surrey Archaeological Collections, xxiii. 149).

The evidence of the maps as to the position of the theatres is obscured, partly by uncertainties as to the dates and authorships both of the engravings and of the surveys on which they were based, and partly by the pictorial character of the topography. They are not strict plans in two dimensions, such as modern cartographers produce, but either drawings in full perspective, or bird’s-eye views in diminished perspective. The imaginary standpoint is always on the south, and the pictorial aspect is emphasized in the foreground, with the result that, while the Bankside theatres, but not those north of the river, are generally indicated, this is rarely with a precision which renders it possible to locate them in relation to the thoroughfares amongst which they stand. This is more particularly the case since, while the general grouping of buildings, gardens, and trees appears, from a comparison of one view with another, to be faithfully given, it is probable that the details are often both conventionally represented and out of scale. The following classification is mainly borrowed from Dr. Martin: (a) Pre-Reformation representations of London throwing no light on the theatres; (b) Wyngaerde, a pictorial drawing (c. 1543–50) by A. Van der Wyngaerde (L. T. Soc. i; Mitton, i); (c) Höfnagel, a plan with little perspective by G. Höfnagel, from a survey of c. 1554–7 (cf. A. Marks in Athenaeum for 31 March 1906), published (1572) with the title Londinum Feracissimi Angliae Regni Metropolis in G. Braun and F. Hohenburg, Civitates Orbis Terrarum (L. T. Soc. ii; Mitton, iv); (d) Agas, an engraving with more perspective, but generally similar to that of Höfnagel and possibly from the same survey, but drawn after 1561, and assigned by G. Vertue, who reproduced it (1737), to Ralph Agas (L. T. Soc. xvii; Mitton, ii); (e) Smith, a coloured drawing by William Smith, possibly based on Höfnagel or Agas, in B. M. Sloane MS. 2596, reproduced in H. B. Wheatley and E. W. Ashbee, W. Smith, The Particular Description of England, 1588 (1879), and in G. P. Baker, The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist (1907), 18; (f) Bankside Views, small representations of the same general character as (c), (d), and (e), used as backgrounds to pictures and described by W. Martin in Antiquary, xlv. 408; (g) Norden, engravings in slight perspective of ‘London’ and ‘Westminster’ by P. Van den Keere in J. Norden, Speculum Britanniae (1593), from survey of about the same date (L. T. Soc. vii; Mitton, v, vi; Furnivall, Harrison’s Description of England, Part I, with notes on p. lxxxix by H. B. Wheatley, reprinted by L. T. Soc. in Record, ii); (h) Delaram Group, perspective views as backgrounds to portrait (c. 1616) of James I by F. Delaram (1620), reproduced by W. Martin in Surrey A. Colls. xxiii. 186, and other portraits probably based on some original of c. 1603; (i) Hondius Group, (i) drawing by P. D. Hondius (1610) in J. Speed, Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain (1611), as inset to map of Britain (L. T. Record, ii, with notes by T. F. Ordish; Baker, f. p.), (ii) engraving on title-page of R. Baker, Chronicle (1643), reproduced by Martin in Surrey A. Colls. xxiii. 187, (iii) engraving on title-page of H. Holland, Herwologia Anglica (1620), (iv) engraving of triumphal arch at coronation entry of James I by W. Kip in S. Harrison (cf. ch. xxiv), The Arches of Triumph (1604), all perhaps based on the same original or survey; (k) Visscher, engraving in perspective by Nikolaus Janssen Visscher (1616), ‘Amstelodami, ex officina Judoci Hondii’, with mutilated text from Camden’s Britannia, reproduced from unique copy in Brit. Mus. (L. T. Soc. iv, with notes by T. F. Ordish in L. T. Record, vi; also W. Martin in Surrey A. Colls. xxiii. 188, and in Ordish, Shakespeare’s London, f. p. and elsewhere); (l) Merian Group, (i) engraving in perspective by M. Merian in J. L. Gottfried, Neuwe Archontologia Cosmica (1638), 290, reproduced by Martin, 191, and Adams, 256, and copied in (ii) f. p. to James Howell, Londinopolis (1657), reproduced by Baker, 154, and (iii) R. Wilkinson, Londina Illustrata (1819); (m) ‘Ryther’ Group, (i) engraving in very slight perspective from drawing unfinished as regards the Bankside in Crace Collection, No. 32, without date, imprint, or indication of authorship, reproduced by W. J. Loftie, History of London, ii. 282, C. L. Kingsford, Chronicles of London, (1905) f. p., and Baker, 36, 125, 135, and ascribed to Augustine Ryther in 1604, but probably of about 1636–45 (cf. 4 N. Q. ix. 95; 6 N. Q. xii. 361, 393; 7 N. Q. iii. 110; vi. 297; vii. 498) in view of (ii) another version in Crace Coll., No. 31, with the Bankside complete, bearing the imprint of ‘Cornelis Danckerts grauer of maps’ in Amsterdam (c. 1631–56), and possibly by Hollar, who worked for Danckerts, and was in England 1636–45, (iii) map by T. Porter (c. 1666), based on (i) with later additions (reproduced L. T. Soc. v); (n) Hollar, engraving in perspective by W. Hollar (in London 1635–43), published by Cornelius Danckerts in 1647 (L. T. Soc. xix; section by Martin in Surrey A. Colls. xxiii. 194); (o) Faithorne and Newcourt, engraving in conventional perspective by William Faithorne from drawing by Richard Newcourt, published in 1658 (L. T. Soc. xviii; Mitton, vii). Of the various maps of post-conflagration London the most useful are that of Leeke and Hollar (c. 1666), of which a section is reproduced by Martin in Surrey A. Colls. xxiii. 191, and those of John Ogilby and W. Morgan (1677, Mitton, viii), John Ogilby and W. Morgan (1682, L. T. Soc. xv), and John Rocque (1746, L. T. Soc. xxxiv, xxxv, xxxvii; Mitton, ix; section in Martin, ut supra, 197). Rendle, Bankside, has attempted to indicate the sites of the Bankside theatres upon a reconstructed map based on Rocque, and Martin in Surrey A. Colls. xxiii. 155, 202, gives parts of the Bankside area as it now stands from the Ordnance Survey map (1896) and a plan of the Anchor Brewery (1909).]

A. INTRODUCTION

The detailed notices, which will form the greater part of this chapter, may with advantage be prefaced with some general observations upon the historical sequence of the theatres and their distribution at different periods over the London area. The earlier Tudor London knew no theatre, in the sense of a building specially planned and maintained for public dramatic performances, although Yarmouth had its ‘game-house’ by 1538, and a theatrum at Exeter was the scene of satirical farces far back in the fourteenth century. The miracle plays, not in London processional, were given in the open air, and probably on temporary scaffolds. Similar stages may sometimes have been used for the interludes, but these were ordinarily represented in the winter-time, and sought the kindly shelter of a hall.[1019] In the provision of specialized buildings, the drama appears to have been anticipated by the ruder sport of baiting. Höfnagel’s pre-Elizabethan map already shows on the Southwark side of the river the two rings, with open centres and roofed seats for spectators, which are repeated later on by Agas and by Smith. They stand in yards or gardens lined with dog-kennels. One is lettered ‘The Bowll bayting’, the other ‘The beare bayting’. When the first Elizabethan theatres were built in 1576, it was the hall on the one hand, and the ring on the other, which determined the general structure of the two types of auditorium that came simultaneously into being.[1020] The ‘private’ house, roofed and lit, and with its seats arranged in tiers along three sides of a long room, and the ‘public’ house, generally circular, with covered stage and galleries, and a central yard or ‘pit’ open to the day, co-existed for more than half a century, and finally merged in the post-Restoration type of theatre which has come down to our own day. The distinction between ‘private’ and ‘public’ is an unessential one, depending probably upon some difference in the methods of paying for admission necessitated by the regulations of the City or the Privy Council.[1021] The performances in all the houses were public in the ordinary sense. There was, however, another important factor, besides the baiting ring, which greatly affected the structure of the open-air theatre. This was the inn-yard. Long before 1576, interludes had been given in public, as well as in the private halls of the great, and even the need for some kind of permanent, or quasi-permanent, installation had been felt. No doubt there were halls in London which could be hired. The keeper of the Carpenters’ Hall in Shoreditch was prosecuted towards the end of Henry VIII’s reign for procuring a Protestant interlude ‘to be openly played’.[1022] Fees for the letting of Trinity Hall for plays occur among the ‘casuall recepts’ of the churchwardens of St. Botolph without Aldersgate in 1566–7.[1023] A jest-book of 1567 records a play at Northumberland Place.[1024] But an even more convenient hospitality was afforded by the great court-yards of the City inns, where there was sack and bottle-ale to hand, and, as the Puritans averred, chambers ready for deeds of darkness to be done, when the play was over.[1025] In these yards, approached by archways under the inn buildings from one or more streets, and surrounded by galleries with external staircases giving access to the upper floors, an audience could quickly gather, behold at their ease, and escape payment with difficulty. The actors could be accommodated with a tiring-room on the ground floor, and perform as on a natural stage between the pillars supporting the galleries. An upper gallery could be used to vary the scene. The first performances in London inns upon record were at the Saracen’s Head, Islington, and the Boar’s Head, Aldgate, both in 1557.[1026] By the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign the use of them was normal. Plays ‘in hostels and taverns’ were specified for prohibition by the proclamation of April 1559, and the City regulations of 1574 are clearly aimed at the control of the ‘greate innes, havinge chambers and secrete places adjoyninge to their open stagies and gallyries’, and impose obligations for the sake of good order upon innkeepers and tavern-keepers in the forefront of those regarded as likely to harbour plays.[1027] It is not reading too much between the lines to suggest that the owners of particular houses specially laid themselves out to secure the attraction of public entertainments, entered into regular contracts with players, and probably even undertook structural alterations which in fact converted their yards into little less than permanent theatres.[1028] We have, indeed, the record of a trade dispute about the workmanship of play-scaffolds at the Red Lion in Stepney as far back as 1567. The Red Lion stood outside the jurisdiction of the City. Within it, and so far as we can judge, much more important in the history of the stage were the Bell and the Cross Keys, both in Gracechurch Street, the Bull in Bishopsgate Street, and the Bel Savage on Ludgate Hill. No one of these four is in fact mentioned by name as a play-house earlier than 1575, and although they must have been hard hit by the regulations of 1574, it is clear that they did not go altogether out of use, especially during the winter, when climatic conditions rendered the suburbs unattractive, for another twenty years. Stockwood, in 1578, speaks of six or eight ‘ordinarie places’ where plays were then performed.[1029] Nevertheless the action of the City, and the enterprise of James Burbadge, whose descendants claimed for him the honour of being ‘the first builder of playhowses’, led to a shifting of the dramatic focus. The Theatre and the Curtain, both built in or about 1576, stood in ‘the fields’ to the north of London proper, and were perhaps soon followed by Newington Butts on the south side of the river, beyond St. George’s Fields; while the Blackfriars, adapted in the same year (1576) by Richard Farrant to house the performances of children, occupied an old monastic building in the precinct of a ‘liberty’ which, although within the walls, was largely exempt from the jurisdiction of the Corporation. This became the home of the Children of the Chapel, while the Paul’s boys played in their own ‘song-school’, either the church of St. Gregory or some other building in the neighbourhood of St. Paul’s. How long this arrangement had existed, or whether any company of children had played in public at all before the date of Farrant’s experiment, we do not know. From 1576 onwards, it is the Theatre and the Curtain which have to bear the brunt of the Puritan attack, and the luxury of these, as compared with the primitive accommodation of the inn-yards, arouses a special indignation. ‘The sumptuous Theatre houses, a continual monument of Londons prodigalitie and folly’, wails Thomas White in 1577. Stockwood in 1578 discommends ‘the gorgeous playing place erected in the fieldes’; and William Harrison, perhaps about the same time, finds it ‘an evident token of a wicked time when plaiers wexe so riche that they can build such houses’.[1030] Presently the theatres became notable amongst the sights which foreign travellers must see in London. Lupold von Wedel in 1584 says nothing of them, although he records the baiting and its rings.[1031] But they are noticed in the following year by Samuel Kiechel, a merchant of Ulm, who writes:[1032]

‘Comedies are given daily. It is particularly mirthful to behold, when the Queen’s comedians act, but annoying to a foreigner who does not know the language, that he understands nothing. There are some peculiar houses, which are so made as to have about three galleries over one another, inasmuch as a great number of people always enters to see such an entertainment. It may well be that they take as much as from 50 to 60 dollars [£10 to £12] at once, especially when they act anything new, which has not been given before, and double prices are charged. This goes on nearly every day in the week; even though performances are forbidden on Friday and Saturday, it is not observed.’

The Theatre and the London inns were still the chief playing-places, when at some date between 1576 and 1596 William Lambarde illustrated his account of the pilgrimages to Boxley, by explaining that those who visited the shrine did not get off scot-free—

‘no more than such as goe to Parisgardein, the Bell Sauage, or Theatre, to beholde Beare baiting, Enterludes, or Fence play, can account of any pleasant spectacle, unlesse they first pay one pennie at the gate, another at the entrie of the Scaffolde, and the thirde for a quiet standing.’[1033]

Paris Garden was the generic name given to the successive places for bear-baiting which lay on the Surrey side of the river, not in Southwark proper, which was in the jurisdiction of the City, but in the Liberty of the Clink, which stretched in a westerly direction along the Bankside, or still farther to the west, in the Manor of Paris Garden itself. In Surrey, no less than in London, plays had established themselves at an early date. A performance was going on in Southwark, while the priests of St. Saviour’s sang Dirige for Henry VIII’s soul in 1547.[1034] The Privy Council ordered the Surrey justices to suppress plays in the Borough and the adjoining places during 1578; and it seems probable that a regular play-house had been built south of the river at a date not much later than that of the Theatre itself. It stood far back behind Southwark, in the village of Newington, divided from the river by St. George’s Fields. The distance and the bad roads were against it; and it was not until the Rose was built in the Clink about 1587, that the Bankside became a serious rival to the ‘fields’ in the north as the home of theatres. The Swan, in Paris Garden, was built in 1595. Newington is too far to the south to appear in the maps, but Norden’s map of 1593 shows two round buildings, standing between Bankside and an unnamed road, which may safely be identified with that called Maiden Lane. One is lettered ‘The Beare howse’, the other, more to the east and the south, ‘The play howse’; and this must clearly be the Rose.

In 1596 the City appear to have at last obtained the assent of the Privy Council to the complete exclusion of plays from the area of their jurisdiction. This is probably the proceeding described, with no precise indication of date, in the following passage from Richard Rawlidge’s A Monster Lately Found out and Discovered, or the Scourging of Tipplers (1628):[1035]

‘London hath within the memory of man lost much of hir pristine lustre, ... by being ... filled with ... sinnes, which ... are ... maintained, in Play-houses, Ale-houses, Bawdy-houses, Dising-houses, ... All which houses, and traps for Gentlemen, and others, of such Receipt, were formerly taken notice of by many Citizens, and well disposed graue Gentlemen ... wherevpon some of the pious magistrates made humble suit to the late Queene Elizabeth of ever-liuing memorie, and her priuy Counsaile, and obteined leaue from her Majesty to thrust those Players out of the Citty and to pull downe the Dicing houses: which accordingly was affected, and the Play-houses in Gracious street, Bishops-gate-street, nigh Paules, that on Ludgate hill, the White-Friars were put down, and other lewd houses quite supprest within the Liberties, by the care of those religious senators, ... and surely had all their successors followed their worthy stepps, sinne would not at this day haue beene so powerfull, and raigning as it is.’

The play-houses in Gracious or Gracechurch Street, Bishopsgate Street, and Ludgate Hill were presumably the Bell and the Cross Keys, the Bull, and the Bel Savage. By the house ‘nigh Paul’s’ Rawlidge possibly meant the choir song-school; but in fact there had been no plays by the Paul’s boys since 1590. If there was really a Whitefriars house at so early a date, this is the only notice preserved of it. It may be suspected that Rawlidge confused it with the Blackfriars, which James Burbadge was apparently prevented, upon representations by the City, from reopening in 1596. The claim of the City to exercise any control over the old religious precincts of the Blackfriars and the Whitefriars was a doubtful one; and although they ultimately secured jurisdiction, they were not able to prevent the so-called ‘private’ theatres from establishing themselves in these ‘liberties’.[1036] With these exceptions, however, and possibly that of the Boar’s Head, which seems to have been used for a few years after 1602, but was more likely just outside the bars, 1596 probably saw the last of playing within the actual gates of the City.

Londoners had now to look wholly to the suburbs for their dramatic entertainment. Prince Lewis of Anhalt-Cöthen found four theatres in 1596.[1037] These were doubtless the Theatre and the Curtain on the north and the Rose and the Swan on the south of the river. The Newington house was still used in 1594, but even before that had long been out of fashion. It was probably also about 1596 that John de Witt wrote his Observations Londinenses. He too mentioned the four theatres, together with the baiting house, and was particularly struck by the newest, and as he avers, the largest and fairest of them, the Swan, of the interior of which he attached a rough sketch to his manuscript. This manuscript is lost, but fortunately an extract survives, copied into a commonplace book by Arend van Buchell of Utrecht. The following is the complete text:[1038]

Ex Observationibus Londinensibus Johannis de Witt.

De phano D. Pauli. Huic Paulino phano adheret locus ab asservandis sacratioribus vestimentis Sacristi dictus, omnino observatione dignus, quippe quo DIANAE delubrum fuisse ferunt. Sacellum est rotundum, hemyphericum, concameratum, cuius structura Romanam antiquitatem referre videtur. Aiunt cum fundamenta templi iacerentur effossam ante huius aediculae fores innumeram cervinorum capitum copiam; inde colligi Dianae sacrificia (cui cervis litabatur) ibi olim peracta esse eique hanc aedem sacratam fuisse; in eodem phano sunt epitaphia et sepulcra varia praeter ea quae alio loco a me notata sunt, Guilelmi Herberti Penbrochiae comitis Walliae praesidis qui obijt A^o aetat. lxiii Christi vero 1569.

Ibidem in aede Westmonasteriensi sunt monumenta cum suis elogiis: Guill. Thynne armigeri ex antiqua Bottevillorum familia, Joannis Thynne fratris qui obijt 14 Martii 1584, item Joannis Bourgh Duisburgi gubernatoris A^o 1596.

Amphiteatra Londinij sunt iv visendae pulcritudinis quae a diversis intersigniis diuersa nomina sortiuntur: in iis varia quotidie scaena populo exhibetur. Horum duo excellentiora vltra Tamisim ad meridiam sita sunt, a suspensis signis ROSA et Cygnus nominata: Alia duo extra vrbem ad septentrionem sunt, viâ quâ itur per Episcopalem portam vulgariter Biscopgat nuncupatam. Est etiam quintum, sed dispari [vsu?] et structura, bestiarum concertationi destinatum, in quo multi vrsi, tauri, et stupendae magnitudinis canes, discretis caueis & septis aluntur, qui [drawing occupies rest of page] ad pugnam adseruantur, iocundissimum hominibus spectaculum praebentes. Theatrorum autem omnium prestantissimum est et amplissimum id cuius intersignium est cygnus (vulgo te theatre off te cijn [off te swan]),[1039] quippe quod tres mille homines in sedilibus admittat, constructum ex coaceruato lapide pyrritide (quorum ingens in Britannia copia est) ligneis suffultum columnis quae ob illitum marmoreum colorem, nasutissimos quoque fallere possent. Cuius quidem formam quod Romani operis vmbram videatur exprimere supra adpinxi.

Narrabat idem se vidisse in Brittannia apud Abrahamum de lyndeley [?] mercatorem Alberti Dureri omnia opera cartacea elegantissima et absolutissima.

The account of Paul Hentzner, who was in London from 31 August to 8 September 1598, lays less stress upon the theatres than upon the baiting, and is not altogether consistent with that of de Witt as to the structure of the Swan, which was the nearest house to the moorings of the royal barge at the west end of Paris Garden.[1040] Hentzner writes:

‘Sunt porro Londini extra Urbem Theatra aliquot, in quibus Histriones Angli Comoedias & Tragoedias singulis fere diebus, in magna hominum frequentia agunt, quas variis etiam saltationibus, suavissima adhibita musica, magno cum populi applausu finire solent. Non longe ab uno horum theatrorum, quae omnia lignea sunt, ad Thamesim navis est regia, quae duo egregia habet conclavia, fenestris perlucidis, picturis & sculpturis eleganter exornata, in sicco & quidem sub tecto collocata, propterea, ut a pluviis & coeli injuria immunis sit.’

Hentzner then describes the baiting.[1041] He concludes:

‘Utuntur in hisce spectaculis sicut & alibi, ubicunque locorum sint Angli, herba Nicotiana, quam Americano idiomate Tabacam nuncupant (Paetum alii dicunt) hoc modo frequentissime; Fistulae in hunc finem ex argilia factae, orificio posteriori, dictam herbam probe exiccatam, ita ut in pulverem facile redigi possit, immittunt, & igne admoto accendunt, unde fumus ab anteriori parte ore attrahitur, qui per nares rursum, tanquam per infurnibulum exit, & phlegma ac capitis defluxiones magna copia secum educit. Circumferuntur insuper in hisce theatris varii fructus venales, ut poma, pyra, nuces & pro ratione temporis, etiam vinum & cerevisia.’[1042]

It is perhaps natural that foreign visitors should be more struck by the English theatres at a time when the English stage was serving as a model to northern Europe, than was the case with a native chronicler of grave and slightly Puritanic tendencies. John Stowe, when he published his Survey of London in 1598, had nothing to say of the Bankside houses, and but little of those in Middlesex. After writing of the miracle plays, he says:

‘Of late time in place of those Stage playes, hath beene vsed Comedies, Tragedies, Enterludes, and Histories, both true and fayned: For the acting whereof certaine publike places as the Theater, the Curtine, &c., haue been erected’ [in margin, ‘Theater and Curten for Comedies & other shewes’].[1043]

In another place, at the end of a description of Holywell, he adds:

‘And neare therevnto are builded two publique houses for the acting and shewe of Comedies, Tragedies, and Histories, for recreation. Whereof the one is called the Courtein, the other the Theatre: both standing on the South-west side towards the field.’[1044]

Even these scanty references were pruned in the second edition of 1603, after the Theatre had disappeared at the end of 1598 and the Chamberlain’s men had left the Curtain. And of the Globe, built during the earlier half of 1599, to which they migrated, Stowe takes no notice. The Globe, however, appears, although unnamed, together with two other theatres, of which one must be the Curtain, in the next foreign account, a very full one by Thomas Platter of Basle, who was in England from 18 September to 20 October 1599.[1045] I translate the passage, of which sufficient use has not been made by historians of the stage:

‘After dinner on the 21st of September, at about two o’clock, I went with my companions over the water, and in the strewn roof-house saw the tragedy of the first Emperor Julius with at least fifteen characters very well acted. At the end of the comedy they danced according to their custom with extreme elegance. Two in men’s clothes and two in women’s gave this performance, in wonderful combination with each other. On another occasion, I also saw after dinner a comedy, not far from our inn, in the suburb; if I remember right, in Bishopsgate. Here they represented various nations, with whom on each occasion an Englishman fought for his daughter, and overcame them all except the German, who won the daughter in fight. He then sat down with him, and gave him and his servant strong drink, so that they both got drunk, and the servant threw his shoe at his master’s head and they both fell asleep. Meanwhile the Englishman went into the tent, robbed the German of his gains, and thus he outwitted the German also. At the end they danced very elegantly both in English and in Irish fashion. And thus every day at two o’clock in the afternoon in the city of London two and sometimes three comedies are performed, at separate places, wherewith folk make merry together, and whichever does best gets the greatest audience. The places are so built, that they play on a raised platform, and every one can well see it all. There are, however, separate galleries and there one stands more comfortably and moreover can sit, but one pays more for it. Thus anyone who remains on the level standing pays only one English penny: but if he wants to sit, he is let in at a further door, and there he gives another penny. If he desires to sit on a cushion in the most comfortable place of all, where he not only sees everything well, but can also be seen, then he gives yet another English penny at another door. And in the pauses of the comedy food and drink are carried round amongst the people, and one can thus refresh himself at his own cost.

‘The comedians are most expensively and elegantly apparelled, since it is customary in England, when distinguished gentlemen or knights die, for nearly the finest of their clothes to be made over and given to their servants, and as it is not proper for them to wear such clothes but only to imitate them, they give them to the comedians to purchase for a small sum.

‘What they can thus produce daily by way of mirth in the comedies, every one knows well, who has happened to see them acting or playing.’

Platter then describes the Cockpit and the baiting. He concludes:

‘With such and many other pastimes besides the English spend their time; in the comedies they learn what is going on in other lands, and this happens without alarm, husband and wife together in a familiar place, since for the most part the English do not much use to travel, but are content ever to learn of foreign matters at home, and ever to take their pastime.’

A year later than Platter, another traveller thus describes a visit to the Bankside:[1046]

‘1600 die Lunae 3 Julii. Audivimus comoediam Anglicam; theatrum ad morem antiquorum Romanorum constructum ex lignis, ita formatum ut omnibus ex partibus spectatores commodatissime singula videre possint. In reditu transivimus pontem magnificis aedificiis ornatum e quibus uni adhuc affixa cernuntur capita quorundam comitum et nobilium, qui laesae Majestatis rei supplicio affecti sunt.’

When Lewis of Anhalt and de Witt wrote, there were four theatres, exclusive of the City inn-yards, which were probably already closed. Platter found two, and sometimes three, performances being given daily. This agrees with the evidence available from other sources. After the scandal of The Isle of Dogs in 1597, the Privy Council decreed a limitation of the London companies to two, the Chamberlain’s men and the Admiral’s. The former played at the Curtain until 1599, when they destroyed the Theatre and built the Globe. The latter played at the Rose until 1600, when they migrated to the newly built Fortune. But it is clear that the ordinance of the Privy Council was not strictly observed. An intruding company was playing in February 1598, either at the Theatre or the Swan. Platter’s three houses in 1599 included the Curtain, together presumably with the Globe and the Rose. When the Council sanctioned the opening of the Fortune in 1600, they understood that the Curtain was to be ‘either ruinated or applied to some other good use’, but it was still the scene of plays in 1601. Finally, in the spring of 1602 Elizabeth ordered the Council to tolerate a third company, that of the Earl of Worcester, Master of the Horse. This was then playing at the Boar’s Head, a short-lived house of which practically nothing is known; in the autumn it moved to the Rose. The Swan possibly went out of use, except for the occasional performances of acrobats and fencers, or of amateurs. On the other hand, Lord Hertford’s men were in London during the winter of 1602–3, in addition to the three privileged companies, and they must have practised somewhere.

To the above must be added, for the closing years of Elizabeth’s reign, the ‘private’ houses; Paul’s reopened in the winter of 1599, the Blackfriars in that of 1600. Of these Platter knows nothing, but Duke Philip Julius of Stettin-Pomerania, in the autumn of 1602, in addition to performances at the Fortune and another theatre, saw also, doubtless at the Blackfriars, the Kinder-comoedia. The following is an extract from the diary of the visit kept by the duke’s secretary, Frederic Gerschow:[1047]

‘13 [September] On the thirteenth a comedy was played, of the taking of Stuhl-Weissenberg, firstly by the Turks, and thereafter back again by the Christians.

14. In the afternoon was played a tragicomedy of Samson and the half tribe of Benjamin.’[1048]

On 16 September the duke and his retinue saw the baiting. On 18 September they visited the Blackfriars, and Gerschow wrote an account of the organization of the Children of the Chapel and of the nature of their performances.[1049]

The Globe and the Fortune continued in regular use, as the houses of the King’s men, and the Prince’s men respectively, during the new reign, and endured to the closing of the theatres in 1642. Each was destroyed by fire and rebuilt; the former in 1613, the latter in 1621. Queen Anne’s men at first used the Boar’s Head and the Curtain, but migrated from the Boar’s Head to the Red Bull, which had been built by 1606. This became their principal house, and they cannot be shown to have used the Curtain after 1609. These were the only companies of men players in London during 1603–8, and the Globe, the Fortune, and the Red Bull are obviously the ‘three houses’ whose rivalry is referred to by Dekker in the following passage from his Raven’s Almanack of 1608:[1050]

‘Another ciuill warre doe I finde wil fal betweene players, who albeit at the beginning of this fatall yeare, they salute one another like sworne brothers, yet before the middle of it, shall they wish one anothers throate cut for two pence. The contention of the two houses, (the gods bee thanked) was appeased long agoe, but a deadly warre betweene the three houses will I feare burst out like thunder and lightning. For it is thought that Flag will be aduanced (as it were in mortall defiance against Flag), numbers of people will also bee mustred and fall to one side or other, the drums and trumpets must be sounded, partes will then (euen by the chiefest players) bee taken: words will passe to and fro: speeches cannot so bee put vp, handes will walke, an alarum be giuen, fortune must fauour some, or els they are neuer able to stand: the whole world must sticke to others, or else al the water in the theames wil not serue to carrie those away that will bee put to flight, and a third faction must fight like wilde Buls against Lyons, or else it will be in vaine to march vp into the field.’

There were, however, more than three London companies about 1608. M. de la Boderie tells us how one fell into disgrace during that year, and how four others subscribed to buy off the consequent inhibition of plays.[1051] The reconciliation is simple. Dekker has in mind only the ‘public’ and not the ‘private’ houses. Of these Paul’s was closed in 1606; it was made worth its Master’s while not to reopen it. The Blackfriars was used by the successive boy companies, known generically as the Queen’s Revels, until 1608 or 1609, when it passed to the King’s men, who thereafter maintained it as a winter house, to supplement the Globe. The Queen’s Revels then moved to the Whitefriars, a private house built at some time before 1608, and occupied in that year by the ephemeral company of the King’s Revels.

An increase in the number of adult companies now made fresh demands upon theatrical house-room. It is presumably the Duke of York’s men who were described at Leicester in 1608 as ‘the Princes players of the White Chapple, London’. The description suggests that they used the Boar’s Head, but if so, nothing more is heard of it, and it is conceivable that they soon succeeded to the Curtain. The Lady Elizabeth’s, who came into existence in 1611, are traceable at the Swan, which Henslowe may have taken over to succeed the Rose, disused, if not pulled down, by 1606. The following lines are in John Heath’s Two Centuries of Epigrammes (1610), but may of course, especially as the Red Bull is not named, date back to the period when the Curtain was still in the hands of the Queen’s men:

A foreign traveller again gives us help. The relation of the visit of Prince Lewis Frederick of Württemberg in 1610 merely records that he went to the Globe, and Justus Zingerling, who was in London at about the same date, has the briefest note of the existence of ‘theatra comoedorum et in quibus ursi et tauri cum canibus committuntur’.[1053] But the itinerary of Prince Otto of Hesse-Cassel in the following year is more expansive. The compiler writes:

‘In London there are seven theatres, where daily, except on Sundays, comedies are performed, whereof the most important is the Globe, which lies over the water. The theatre, where the children play, is on the hither side of the water; they play at three o’clock, but only from Michaelmas to Easter. Here it only costs half a shilling to enter, but for the other places at least half a crown. These play only with lights, and are the best company in London.’[1054]

In addition to the Globe and the Whitefriars, the tale of seven theatres is probably made up by the Blackfriars, the Fortune, the Red Bull, the Curtain, and the Swan.

Henslowe’s correspondence with Daborne shows that he still had a ‘publique howse’, probably the Swan, in December 1613, and also that in June of that year his company was only just thinking of ‘comming over’ for a summer season, presumably from the Whitefriars, as he had recently carried out an amalgamation between the Lady Elizabeth’s men and the Queen’s Revels.[1055] In the following year occurred an episode which curiously emphasizes the constant shifting of the focus of theatrical interest during the whole of the period with which we are concerned. Originally stageland was in the heart of the City itself. With the building of the first theatres, it was transferred to the Fields of the northern suburbs. During the last decade of the sixteenth century the Fields in their turn gave way to the Bankside. The Rose, the Swan, and the Globe successively made their appearance, and the vestry of Southwark began to echo the earlier outcry of the City against the iniquities of players, until their mouths were stopped with tithes. But the transpontine period proved a brief one. Hardly was the Globe up, before Alleyn’s choice of a site for the Fortune set the fashion veering again, and opened up a new theatrical region in the western suburbs. This was convenient for the Court and the great houses along the Strand and for the lawyers in the Temple and at Westminster, as well as for the City proper, and its tradition has endured until quite recent years. The Red Bull and the Whitefriars followed in the same area. On the other hand, the Rose had vanished, and the King’s men, although they did not desert the Globe, acknowledged the change of venue by taking up their winter quarters in the Blackfriars hard by. One result was that men who had ridden to the Fields and been ferried to the Bankside, now walked or drove in their coaches to the theatre door. During the spring of 1614 things were probably at their worst. Both the Globe, after its fire, and the Hope were still in the builder’s hands, and if the Lady Elizabeth’s lingered again at the Whitefriars, there can have been no plays across the water at all. The watermen, who twenty years before had exercised the influence of their patron, the Lord Admiral, to induce the Privy Council to revoke an inhibition on the Bankside houses, sent up a bitter cry of protest. John Taylor, the ‘water-poet’, whom they chose as their spokesman, tells the story.[1056] A petition to the King was prepared, to the effect that no play-house might be permitted ‘in London or in Middlesex, within four miles of the City on that side of the Thames’, and with this Taylor pursued James to Theobalds, Newmarket, and Royston. It recited the service done by watermen in the navy during the Armada invasion of 1588 and in such expeditions as those of Essex in 1596 and 1597. And it proceeded:

‘Afterwards the players began to play on the Bankside and to leave playing in London and Middlesex (for the most part), then there went such great concourse of people by water that the small number of watermen remaining at home were not able to carry them, by reason of the court, the terms, the players, and other employments, so that we were enforced and encouraged (hoping that this golden stirring would have lasted ever) to take and entertain men and boys.’

It was calculated that the number of watermen and their dependants between Windsor and Gravesend had now by 1614 reached 40,000:

‘The cause of the greater half of which multitude hath been the players playing on the Bankside, for I have known three companies besides the bear-baiting, at once there; to wit, the Globe, the Rose, and the Swan. And it is an infallible truth that, had they never played there, it had been better for watermen by the one half of their living, for the company is increased more than half by their means of playing there in former times.’

Foreign employment had now come to an end:

‘And the players have all (except the King’s men) left their usuall residency on the Bankside, and do play in Middlesex far remote from the Thames, so that every day in the week they do draw unto them three or four thousand people, that were used to spend their monies by water.’

Such, Taylor assures us, was the effect of the petition. It was referred by James to ‘his commissioners for suits’, that is to say, the Court of Requests, composed of Sir Julius Caesar, Sir Thomas Parry, Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Henry Montagu, Sir Walter Cope, George Calvert, and Baron Sotherton. The King’s men exhibited a counter-petition, and the case came on for hearing.

‘Sir Francis Bacon very worthily said that so far as the public weal was to be regarded before pastimes, or a serviceable decaying multitude before a handful of particular men, or profit before pleasure, so far was our suit to be preferred before theirs.’

The players appealed to the Earl of Somerset, who became Lord Chamberlain and in that capacity their official protector on 10 July 1614, but he proved well affected towards the watermen. The hearing was adjourned and never resumed, owing to the death of Cope on 31 July, the promotion of Caesar to the Mastership of the Rolls on 1 October, and the consequent dissolution of the commission. Ill feeling broke out between Taylor and his fellows the watermen, who declared that he met the players at supper at the Cardinal’s Hat on Bankside, and took bribes of them to let the suit fall. Taylor, therefore, wrote his pamphlet to vindicate his position.[1057] The completion of the new Globe and the Hope during the progress of the dispute had probably eased matters temporarily for the watermen, but the growing tendency of things theatrical towards Middlesex was not permanently checked. Some of the minor companies used the Hope until 1617, and then left it to the bears again. The Globe survived, but will be found to have occupied during the Caroline period a distinctly secondary position to the Blackfriars in the economy of the King’s men. For this there was another reason besides the geographical superiority of Middlesex over Surrey. The acquisition of the Blackfriars, even though only for winter purposes, in 1608 was an acknowledgement of the advantages for adult companies of the ‘private’ or roofed type of theatre, hitherto used only by boys. Once these advantages were realized, the doom of the old ‘ring’ type, with its central opening, was written. Probably the Hope was the only new house constructed on these lines after 1608, and obviously the Hope required free ventilation to get rid of the stink of bears and dogs. In 1615 Philip Rosseter and others obtained sanction for the conversion of Porter’s Hall in the Blackfriars into a theatre. This was to be used by children as well as adults, and was probably roofed. It was pulled down again by what seems a somewhat arbitrary decision in 1617. About the same time, the roofed Cockpit in Drury Lane was converted into a theatre, under the name of the Phoenix, for the occupation of the Queen’s men, who migrated to it from the Red Bull. Whether or not the Fortune was given a roof at the rebuilding of 1623, or the Red Bull at somewhat the same time, is uncertain; but at any rate the Salisbury Court theatre, built near the Whitefriars in 1629, perhaps to replace the old Whitefriars theatre, was a roofed house.[1058] This was the last new theatre built before the civil wars. The Blackfriars, the Cockpit, and Salisbury Court were the most important of the Caroline stages, and in the post-Restoration houses, although these were on a larger scale than the ‘private’ houses of the past, the roofed model was invariably adopted.

Soon after the completion of Salisbury Court, Edmund Howes, who had already edited the fourth edition of John Stowe’s Annales in 1615, was again revising the text for the fifth edition of 1631, and took occasion to append to his account of the burnings of the Globe and the Fortune the following summary of theatrical enterprise since 1569:[1059]

‘In the yeere one thousand sixe hundred twenty nine, there was builded a new faire Play-house, neere the white Fryers. And this is the seauenteenth Stage, or common Play-house, which hath beene new made within the space of threescore yeeres within London and the Suburbs, viz.

‘Fiue Innes, or common Osteryes turned to Play-houses, one Cockpit, S. Paules singing Schoole, one in the Black-fryers, and one in the White-fryers, which was built last of all, in the yeare one thousand sixe hundred twenty nine, all the rest not named, were erected only for common Play-houses, besides the new built Beare garden, which was built as well for playes, and Fencers prizes, as Bull bayting; besides, one in former time at Newington Buts; Before the space of threescore yeares aboue-sayd, I neither knew, heard, nor read, of any such Theaters, set Stages, or Play-houses, as haue beene purposely built within mans memory.’

This passage serves as a fair summary of the detailed investigations set out in this chapter. Howes only allows one house to the Blackfriars and one to the Whitefriars, and must therefore be leaving out of account the abortive Porter’s Hall house, and treating Salisbury Court as a continuation of the earlier Whitefriars. The Hope and Newington Butts are afterthoughts, and make his seventeen into nineteen. We can identify his five inns as the Bull, the Bell, the Cross Keys, the Bel Savage, and probably the Red Lion, although this just antedates his period of sixty years; while his balance of eight unnamed common play-houses must be the Theatre, the Curtain, the Rose, the Swan, the Globe, the Fortune, the Boar’s Head, and the Red Bull.

Prynne, in his Histriomastix (1633), records six ‘divels chappels’ as then in use, and these are doubtless the six houses, the Blackfriars, Globe, Cockpit, Salisbury Court, Fortune, and Red Bull, which are also noted by the Restoration writers on the stage, John Downes and James Wright, as surviving up to the cataclysm of the civil wars.[1060]

Somewhat more confused and vague in their datings are the reminiscences about 1660 of the Marquis of Newcastle in his letter of advice to Prince Charles, under the head of ‘Devertismentes for your Ma^tie People’:[1061]

‘Firste for London Paris Garden will holde good for the meaner People.

‘Then for severall Playe Houses as ther weare five att leaste In my Time,—

‘Black-Friers, the Cock-Pitt, Salsburye Courte, the Fortune, & the Redd Bull,—Ther weare the Boyes thatt played at Black-Friers, & Paules, & then the Kinges Players played att the Globe—which is nowe calde the Phenixe [!]—Some Played, att the Bores heade, & att the Curtin In the feildes & some att the Hope whiche Is the Beare Garden, and some at White Friers,—Butt five or Sixe Playe Houses Is enough for all sortes off Peoples divertion & pleasure In thatt kinde.’

The marquis is the only one of the chroniclers who definitely records the Boar’s Head.

A manuscript continuation of Stowe’s Annales, found in a copy of the 1631 edition, narrates the havoc wrought by Puritans and ground-landlords:[1062]

‘Play Houses. The Globe play house on the Banks side in Southwarke, was burnt downe to the ground, in the yeare 1612. And now built vp againe in the yeare 1613, at the great charge of King Iames, and many Noble men and others. And now pulled downe to the ground, by Sir Matthew Brand, On Munday the 15 of April 1644, to make tenements in the room of it.

‘The Blacke Friers players play-house in Blacke Friers, London, which had stood many yeares, was pulled downe to the ground on Munday the 6 day of August 1655, and tennements built in the rome.

‘The play house in Salsbury Court, in Fleetstreete, was pulled downe by a company of souldiers, set on by the sectuaries of these sad times, on Saturday the 24 day of March 1649.

‘The Phenix in Druery Lane, was pulled downe also this day, being Saterday the 24 day of March 1649, by the same souldiers.

‘The Fortune Play-house betweene White Crosse streete and Golding Lane was burnd downe to the ground in the yeare 1618. And built againe with brick worke on the outside in the yeare 1622. And now pulled downe on the inside by the souldiers this 1649.

‘The Hope, on the Banks side in Southwarke, commonly called the Beare Garden, a Play House for Stage Playes on Mundayes, Wedensdayes, Fridayes, and Saterdayes, and for the baiting of the Beares on Tuesdayes and Thursdayes, the stage being made to take vp and downe when they please. It was built in the year 1610, and now pulled downe to make tennementes, by Thomas Walker, a peticoate maker in Cannon Streete, on Tuesday the 25 day of March 1656. Seuen of M^r. Godfries beares, by the command of Thomas Pride, then hie Sheriefe of Surry, were then shot to death, on Saterday the 9 day of February 1655, by a company of souldiers.’

Downes and Wright do not mention the Hope, as they were not discussing baiting. On the other hand, the annalist says nothing of the fate of the Red Bull, which in fact appears to have escaped destruction, to have been occasionally used for ‘drolls’ during the Commonwealth, and to have served once more, with the Cockpit and Salisbury Court, the demolition of which was probably limited to the interior fittings, for the first entertainments of the Restoration. The building of Vere Street in 1660, Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1661, and Drury Lane in 1663 made them obsolete.[1063]

These records leave ambiguous the fate of the Curtain and the Swan. The Curtain is traceable in occasional use up to about 1627, and is figured as a roundish building in the ‘Ryther’ maps, which are probably of a decade later.[1064] It cannot, therefore, have vanished long before the civil wars, and was the most long-lived of all the theatres. It may, of course, have been rebuilt, later than its original foundation in 1576, but as to this there is no evidence. The ‘Ryther’ maps also show the Fortune. No other maps give any of the theatres on the north of the river. Of the Bankside houses, the Swan is shown by a decagonal ground-plan, with the inscription ‘Old Play house’, in the Paris Garden Manor survey of 1627.[1065] And it is described as still existing side by side with the Globe and the Hope, but clearly also as derelict, in the following passage from Holland’s Leaguer (1632):

‘Especially, and aboue all the rest, she was most taken with the report of three famous Amphytheators, which stood so neere scituated, that her eye might take view of them from the lowest Turret, one was the Continent of the World, because halfe the yeere a World of Beauties, and braue Spirits resorted vnto it; the other was a building of excellent Hope, and though wild beasts and Gladiators did most possesse it, yet the Gallants that came to behold those combats, though they were of a mixt Society, yet were many Noble worthies amongst them; the last which stood, and as it were shak’d handes with this Fortresse, beeing in times past as famous as any of the other, was now fallen to decay, and like a dying Swanne, hanging downe her head, seemed to sing her owne dierge.’[1066]

I turn now to the maps of the Bankside, which, had they been datable, and drawn with cartographical precision, ought not only to have furnished valuable evidence as to the duration of the theatres, but also to have indicated accurately the position of each amongst the streets and lanes of the district. Neither condition is, however, fulfilled. Even where the date of an engraving is known, the date of the survey on which it was based can, as a rule, be only approximately determined. And the constant intrusion of pictorial elements, which gives the maps the character of perspective views rather than of plans, is naturally emphasized on the Bankside, which has to serve as a foreground to the design. The main topographical features which have to be borne in mind are simple, and can easily be related to those in John Rocque’s map of 1746, as interpreted by Strype’s Survey of 1720, or in a modern Ordnance map. The whole region concerned lies roughly between the southern approaches to London and Blackfriars Bridges. It underwent a good deal of development during one period, especially in the area of the Clink, a liberty lying between Southwark on the east and another liberty of Paris Garden on the west, and affording a convenient suburban resort outside the jurisdiction of the City. Stowe’s account of the neighbourhood in 1598 is perhaps a little misleading. He describes no more than the Bankside proper, ‘a continuall building of tenements’ on the riverside, extending about half a mile west of London Bridge. Here he places, from west to east, the bear gardens, the former stews, the prison of the Clink, Winchester House, and the church of St. Mary Overie in Southwark.[1067] This agrees pretty well with the maps of Agas (c. 1561) and Norden (1593), except that there was already a group of houses falling outside Stowe’s purview, which stood on the river near Paris Garden Stairs and practically continued the Bankside westwards. But there was also, which Stowe does not mention, a marshy hinterland to the Bankside, of ponds and gardens, among which Agas, and still more Norden, show a good many scattered houses. By the end of the century there was a fairly definite north to south street known as Deadman’s Place, which debouched from the east end of the Bankside, and from which in its turn struck out one called Maid or Maiden Lane, which went in an irregular line westwards over the marshes, and was finally joined by two divergent ways, Love Lane and Gravel (afterwards Holland) Lane, to the Paris Garden group of houses. Thus was formed a rough parallelogram, half a mile long, and from 200 to 350 feet deep, within or near which all the theatrical sites are placed by the maps. In Norden’s map of 1593, both the Bear House and the Play House, which must be the Rose, stand considerably to the west of Deadman’s Place. The Bear House is the most westerly of the two, and is about halfway between the Bankside houses on the north and Maid Lane on the south. The Rose is a good deal nearer Maid Lane. In the Delaram views (1603–20) there are three flagged, but unnamed, structures. One which stands well back from the river and, after allowing for the view-point, appears slightly the most easterly of the three, is cylindrical; the upper half is alone windowed, and has a smaller diameter than the lower half. It is placed amongst trees and meadows. There is nothing which obviously indicates Maid Lane.[1068] The two other buildings stand much nearer the river’s edge, amongst houses; they are angled, probably octagonal, and not cylindrical. The ‘Hondius’ views repeat the cylindrical building and the most westerly of the two angled buildings much in the same relative position; the intermediate one has disappeared. It seems obvious that the cylindrical building must be the Globe, and the other two the Bear Garden, afterwards the Hope, to the west, and the Rose, left out of the ‘Hondius’ group, because it disappeared in 1605, in the centre. The Delaram and ‘Hondius’ views do not extend far enough west to include the Swan. It is shown by Visscher in 1616, and named. So are the Bear Garden and the Globe, both of which appear as angled buildings, octagonal or hexagonal, about equidistant from the Bankside houses, and north of Maid Lane, the angle of which next Deadman’s Place is shown.[1069] As the change from a cylindrical to an angled representation of the Globe coincides with the rebuilding of the house in 1614, we may perhaps infer that the structural form is not a mere cartographic convention.[1070] It is rather singular that in the Merian maps (circa 1638) there are four houses again, including the Swan, well to the west. This, with two of the three houses in the eastern group, is named by the engraver. A third unnamed house stands between the Globe on the east and the Bear Garden on the west, which is approximately where the Rose used to stand. It is distinctly nearer the river than the other two, but all three are north of Maid Lane, from which the Bear Garden is slightly more remote than the Globe.[1071] If the Rose had actually a second term of existence, it was probably only a brief one.[1072] The fullest of the Ryther maps (c. 1636–45) has two angled buildings, one to the west, rather nearer to Bankside than to Maid Lane; the other to the east, and south of Maid Lane, standing in an angle between that and a track running from north-west to south-east. There are no names, but obviously the eastern house is the Globe, and the western the Hope, and indeed the dogs can be made out. The track joining Maid Lane may be Globe Alley. The Hollar view of 1647 shows two cylindrical, not angled, buildings. One lettered ‘The Globe’ is on the extreme brink of the river; the other, to the east and south of it, is lettered ‘Beere bayting’. Faithorne and Newcourt, in 1658, give no theatres proper, but only a ring marked ‘Beare garden’. Finally, Leeke and Hollar about 1666 give a single unnamed roundish theatre, south of Maid Lane. Presumably it is the Globe, but copied from a survey of earlier date, as the Globe had been pulled down for tenements in 1644.

On the whole, the maps are disappointing guides. It seems more probable than has quite been recognized, that the singular two-storied structure shown by Hondius and Delaram really represents the earlier, the Shakespearian, Globe. And the representation of a fourth house by Merian, even if he did not know its name, gives support to the view that the Rose may have had some kind of existence at a later date than the Sewers records indicate. But as regards the alinement, the distance from the river, and the relation to Maid Lane, of the three houses in the Clink, it is clear that no consistent story is told. The general impression one gets is that the Hope stood farthest to the west, then the Rose, and then the Globe; and that the Rose stood nearest to the river, then the Hope, and then the Globe. Nor is this inconsistent with documentary evidence, which in particular indicates that the parcel of land, on which the latest of the Bear Gardens was built, was contiguous on the west to that known as ‘the little Rose’.[1073] Bear Garden and Rose Alley, running side by side from the Bankside into Maid Lane or Park Street, are traceable in eighteenth-century maps and in the modern Ordnance map.[1074] Did one judge by the maps alone, one would probably, in spite of the dissenting testimony of ‘Ryther’ and of Leeke and Hollar, come to the conclusion that the Globe stood to the north of Maid Lane. The balance of other evidence points unmistakably in the other direction.[1075]

B. THE PUBLIC THEATRES

i. The Red Lion Inn.

ii. The Bull Inn.

iii. The Bell Inn.

iv. The Bel Savage Inn.

v. The Cross Keys Inn.

vi. The Theatre.

vii. The Curtain.

viii. Newington Butts.

ix. The Rose.

x. The Swan.

xi. The Globe.

xii. The Fortune.

xiii. The Boar’s Head.

xiv. The Red Bull.

xv. The Hope.

xvi. Porter’s Hall.

i. THE RED LION INN

The following record appears in the court books of the Carpenters’ Company:[1076]

Courte holden the xv^th daie of Julie 1567, Annoque Regni Reginae Eliz. nono by M^r William Ruddoke, M^r Richard More, Henrye Whreste & Richard Smarte wardeins, & M^r Bradshawe.

Memorandum that at courte holden the daie & yeare abovesayd that, whear certaine varyaunce, discord & debate was betwene Wyllyam Sylvester carpenter on thone partie & John Brayne grocer on thother partie, yt is agreed, concluded & fullie determyned by the saide parties, by the assent & consent of them bothe, with the advise of the M^r & wardeins abovesayd that Willyam Buttermore, John Lyffe, Willyam Snellinge & Richard Kyrbye, Carpenters, shall with expedicon goe & peruse suche defaultes as are & by them shalbe found of in & aboute suche skaffoldes, as he the said Willyam hathe mad at the house called the Red Lyon in the parishe of Stebinyhuthe, & the said Willyam Sillvester shall repaire & amend the same with their advize substancyallie, as they shall thinke good. And that the said John Brayne, on Satterdaie next ensuenge the date above written, shall paye to the sayd Willyam Sylvester the some of eight poundes, tenne shillinges, lawfull money of England, & that after the playe, which is called the storye of Sampson, be once plaied at the place aforesaid the said John shall deliver to the said Willyam such bondes as are now in his custodie for the performaunce of the bargaine. In witnesse whereof both parties hereunto hathe sett their handes.

by me John Brayne grocer.

[Sylvester’s mark.]

This is the only notice of the Red Lion playing-inn which has been preserved, but John Brayne, grocer, is doubtless the same who financed his brother-in-law, James Burbadge, in the far more important enterprise of the Theatre in 1576. Stebunheth or Stepney was a parish in Middlesex, lying to the east of the City, beyond Whitechapel, and, although near enough to be in a sense a suburb, was outside the civic jurisdiction.

ii. THE BULL INN

The first notice of the Bull is on 7 June 1575 when the playing of a ‘prize’ there is recorded in the register of the School of Defence. It appears to have been the most popular of all localities for this purpose and there are fourteen similar notices of its use in the register, ending with one on 3 July 1590.[1077] Florio refers to it as a place for plays in 1578.[1078] Stephen Gosson in his Schoole of Abuse (1579) exempts from his ordinary condemnation of plays The Jew and Ptolemy ‘shown at the Bull’.[1079] On 1 July 1582 the Earl of Warwick asked permission from the Lord Mayor for his servant John David to play his provost prizes at ‘the Bull in Bishopsgatestrete or some other conuenient place to be assigned within the liberties of London’. This was refused, much to Warwick’s annoyance, on the ground that an inn was a place ‘somewhat to close for infection’, and David appointed to play ‘in an open place of the Leaden hall’.[1080] The Bull, with the Bell, was assigned by a civic order of 28 November 1583 to the Queen’s men for their first winter season. Tarlton and the Queen’s men are said in the Jests to have played ‘oftentimes’ at ‘the Bull in Bishops-gate-street’, and here their play of The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, with Tarlton in the parts of the judge and the clown and Knell in that of Henry, was given.[1081] This must, of course, have been between 1583 and Tarlton’s death in 1588. In 1592 the translator of The Spaniard’s Monarchie disclaims any ‘title fetched from the Bull within Bishopsgate, as a figge for a Spaniard’. I do not know whether any old play underlying the Admiral’s (q.v.) Spanish Fig of 1601–2 can be referred to. The house was still in use during 1594, for in April or May of that year Anthony Bacon settled in Bishopsgate, to the vexation of his mother, ‘on account of its neighbourhood to the Bull Inn, where plays and interludes were continually acted, and would, she imagined, corrupt his servants’.[1082] Richard Flecknoe mentions the Bull in Bishopsgate Street, with the Cross-Keys, as one of the inns turned into theatres at the beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, as was ‘at this day to be seen’ in 1664.[1083] The site was at No. 91 on the west of Bishopsgate Street, and is shown in Hatton’s map of 1708, and the Ordnance Survey maps of 1848–51 and 1875.

iii. THE BELL INN

This inn existed in 1560, for on 12 June of that year ‘the wyff of the Bell in Gracyous-strett’ was carted as a bawd and whore.[1084] Plays must have been used there in 1576–7, in the Revels Account for which year an item of 10d. is included ‘ffor the cariadge of the partes of y^e well counterfeit from the Bell in Gracious strete to St. Iohns to be performed for the play of Cutwell’.[1085] With the Bull, it was assigned to the Queen’s men by a civic order of 28 November 1583 for their first winter season. Tarlton’s Jests also mention Tarlton and ‘his fellowes’, probably the Queen’s men, as performing at the Bell ‘by’ the Cross Keys which was also in Gracious Street, and this must have been before Tarlton’s death in 1588.[1086] Both houses may be included in Rawlidge’s reference to play-houses in Gracious street and elsewhere ‘put down’ by the City in Elizabeth’s time. I suppose that the site is that of Bell Yard at No. 12 on the west of Gracechurch Street.[1087]

iv. THE BEL SAVAGE INN

The Bel Savage is named as an early London play-house in the 1596 edition of Lambarde’s Perambulation of Kent. This inn, of which the name is still preserved on Ludgate Hill, where it stood until 1873 (Harben, 63), must be distinguished from another in Gracechurch Street once kept by Tarlton, which in his time was known as the Saba.[1088] The origin of the name is obscure; a deed of 1452 refers to an ‘inn ... called Savages Inn, otherwise called the Bell on the Hoop, in the parishe of St. Bride in Fleet Street’ (L. T. R. ii. 71). Probably therefore the notion of the Belle Sauvage is a later perversion. Gascoigne, in the prologue to his Glass of Government (1575), repudiates the ‘worthie jests’ and ‘vain delights’ of ‘Bellsavage fair’.[1089] Gosson, in 1579, excepts from his general condemnation of plays ‘the two prose books, played at the Belsavage, where you shall find never a word without wit, never a line without pith, never a letter placed in vain’.[1090] A play-house ‘on Ludgate Hill’ is included by Rawlidge in his list of those ‘put down’ in Elizabeth’s time. Probably the Queen’s men were acting at the Bel Savage in 1588, for after the death of Tarlton in that year was published ‘a sorowfull newe sonnette, intituled Tarltons Recantacion uppon this theame gyven him by a gentleman at the Belsavage without Ludgate (nowe or els never) beinge the laste theame he songe’.[1091] Prynne’s reference to Dr. Faustus (q.v.) at the Bel Savage suggests that at some time the Admiral’s also played there. It was also occasionally used for the playing of ‘prizes’; the earliest recorded date in the Register of the School of Defence being in 1575–7 and the latest on 31 January 1589.[1092]

v. THE CROSS KEYS INN

This inn may have been the play-house, or one of the play-houses, ‘in Gracious Street’ said by Rawlidge to have been ‘put down’ under Elizabeth. The first notice of it dates from 23 June 1579, on which day James Burbadge was arrested at the suit of John Hynde for £5 1s. 1d., ‘as he came down Gracious Street towards the Cross Keys there to a play’. The house is described as the dwelling-house of Richard Ibotson, citizen and brewer of London.[1093] It was in use as a place of popular amusement during the life of Tarlton, who died in 1588, for one of the Jests relates how he came from the Bell, where he was playing to ‘the Crosse-Keyes in Gracious streete’ to see Banks’s performing horse there.[1094] A company can first be definitely located at it in 1589, on 5 November of which year Lord Strange’s men, as reported by Lord Mayor Hart to Burghley, disobeyed an admonition to forbear playing, and ‘went to the Crosse Keys and played that afternoon’. In 1594 Strange’s men were absorbed in Lord Hunsdon’s, and on 8 October 1594 Hunsdon wrote to the Lord Mayor to obtain toleration for ‘my nowe companie of players’ who had been accustomed ‘to plaie this winter time within the citye at the Crosse Kayes in Gracious street’.[1095] How long Shakespeare’s fellows continued to use the Cross Keys as a winter house is unknown; presumably it ceased to be available in 1596. The adaptation of the inn as a theatre was still visible at the Restoration, and is assigned by Richard Flecknoe to ‘about the beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s reign’. The site is shown in Ogilby and Morgan’s map of 1677 and the Ordnance Survey map of 1848–51: it is on the west of Gracechurch Street.

vi. THE THEATRE

[Bibliographical Note.—Material is available in the records of four litigations: (a) Peckham v. Allen (Wards and Liveries, 1589) as to the title to the site; (b) Burbadge v. Ames et al. (Coram Rege, 1596–9) and Earl of Rutland v. Allen and Burbadge (Exchequer, 1599–1602) as to the title to a neighbouring plot; (c) Burbadge v. Brayne (Chancery, 1588–95).

Brayne (afterwards Miles) v. Burbadge (Chancery, 1590–5), and Miles v. Burbadge (Requests, 1597), as to the profits of the house; (d) Allen v. Street (Coram Rege, 1600), Burbadge v. Allen (Requests, 1600), Allen v. Burbadge (Queen’s Bench, 1601–2), and Allen v. Burbadge et al. (Star Chamber, 1601–2), as to the removal of the fabric. A few documents from these, some of which he supposed to relate to the Blackfriars, were printed by Collier in Memoirs of the Actors (1846 and H. E. D. P. iii. 257) and in Original History of the Theatre in Shoreditch (1849, Sh. Soc. Papers, iv. 63). A large number were used by Halliwell-Phillipps for his excursus on The Theatre and Curtain (Outlines, i. 345), and in C. C. Stopes, Burbage and Shakespeare’s Stage (1913), where abstracts of (a) and (b) may be consulted. The full texts of (c) and (d) are printed in C. W. Wallace, The First London Theatre, Materials for a History (1913, Nebraska University Studies, xiii. 1). The exact locality of the site has been carefully investigated by W. W. Braines in Holywell Priory and the Site of the Theatre, Shoreditch (1915, Indication of Houses of Historical Interest in London, xliii), and again in The Site of the Theatre, Shoreditch (1917, L. T. R. xi. 1).]

The following statement as to the beginnings of theatrical enterprise in London is made by Cuthbert Burbadge and his family in the so-called Sharers Papers of 1635:[1096]

‘The father of us, Cutbert and Richard Burbage, was the first builder of playehowses, and was himselfe in his younger yeeres a player. The Theater hee built with many hundred poundes taken up at interest. The players that lived in those first times had onely the profitts arising from the dores, but now the players receave all the commings in at the dores to themselves and halfe the galleries from the houskepers. Hee built this house upon leased ground, by which meanes the landlord and hee had a great suite in law, and, by his death, the like troubles fell on us, his sonnes; wee then bethought us of altering from thence, and at like expence built the Globe.’

The accuracy of this is fully borne out by the records of the various legal proceedings in connexion with the Theatre, which a painful investigation has exhumed, and the topographical indications furnished by the evidence in some of these have made it possible to locate with some precision the site of London’s first regular play-house.

The Theatre stood in the Liberty of Halliwell or Holywell, part of the Middlesex parish of St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, immediately outside the Bishopsgate entrance to the City.[1097] The name of the Liberty was derived from an ancient holy well, which has now disappeared, and its status from the fact that it had been the property of a priory of Benedictine nuns. The buildings of the priory lay between Shoreditch High Street, leading north from Bishopsgate, on the east and the open Finsbury fields on the west. Its southern gate was in a lane leading from the High Street to the Fields, then and still known as Holywell Lane or Street, on the south of which lay the Prioress’s pasture called the Curtain. Part of this south end of the liberty, lying on both sides of Holywell Lane, had been leased in 1537 and 1538 to the Earls of Rutland, who continued to hold it from the Crown after the dissolution in 1539, and obtained a renewed lease in 1584.[1098] The rest of the property, including the main conventual buildings, was sold in 1544 to one Henry Webb, whose daughter Susan and her husband Sir George Peckham sold it in 1555 to Christopher Bumsted, and he in the same year to Christopher Allen and his son Giles. The alienation of 1555 was challenged as illegal by Susan Peckham’s heirs in 1582, and ultimately, but not until about thirty years later, they appear to have made good their claim.[1099] In the meantime Giles Allen had leased a part of the property, which became the site of the Theatre, to James Burbadge on 13 April 1576.[1100] This was bounded to the north by the wall of Allen’s own garden, probably corresponding to the main cloister of the convent, on the east or south-east by the Earl of Rutland’s holding, and on the west by a ditch dividing it from the open Finsbury fields. Within the ditch and divided from it by a strip of void ground, was the old brick wall of the precinct. On the extreme south was a bit of void ground lying between an Oat Barn occupied by Rutland and another Great Barn included in the lease. The Oat Barn and the void ground were in fact debatable property claimed both by Allen and Rutland. North of the Great Barn, and immediately to the east of the precinct wall was more void and garden ground; farther to the east the ‘inner court yarde’ of the convent. This held tenements backing upon Allen’s garden to the north, and others, including a mill-house, backing on the garden ground to the west. In this yard was a well, probably the eponymous ‘Holywell’, which fed a horsepond by Rutland’s stable on the south-east, and then drained away through the debatable ground to the Finsbury ditch.[1101] Since Burbadge’s barn is known to have been shored up to the Theatre, it is evident that this must have been constructed in the void and garden ground between the tenements and the precinct wall, and as there was no right of way through Rutland’s holding from Holywell Lane, an entrance was made through the wall direct from Finsbury fields. The Theatre itself, indeed, was sometimes loosely spoken of as ‘in the fields’.[1102] Working from later title-deeds of the locality, Mr. Braines has successfully located the precise site of the building in the angle now formed by Curtain Road, which occupies the strip of void ground between the precinct wall and Finsbury ditch, and New Inn Yard, which occupies a strip of the ‘debateable ground’ and a strip also of the site of the Great Barn. The site is now part of the premises of the Curtain Road Elementary School.[1103]

Burbadge’s lease was for a term of twenty-one years from Lady Day 1576. He was to pay a fine of £20 and an annual rent of £14. He covenanted to spend £200 within the first ten years in improving the existing buildings, and in return Allen covenanted to make a new lease for twenty-one years at any time within the first ten years, and also to allow the tenant at any time within the term of either lease ‘to take down such building as should within the sayd tenne yeeres be erected on the sayd voyde growndes for a theater or playinge place’. It was also agreed that Allen and his wife and family ‘vpon lawfull request therfore made’ should be entitled ‘to enter or come into the premisses and their in some one of the vpper romes to have such convenient place to sett or stande to se such playes as shalbe ther played freely without any thinge therefore payeinge soe that the sayd Gyles hys wyfe and familie doe com and take ther places before they shalbe taken vpp by any others’. Burbadge, a joiner as well as a player, had probably the technical qualifications for his enterprise. But he was a man of small means, not worth above 100 marks, and had no credit.[1104] He found a partner in his brother-in-law, John Brayne, a well-to-do grocer of Bucklersbury, who had already been connected with a play-house speculation at the Red Lion inn. The association proved a calamitous one, and its history can only be traced through the dubious ex parte statements of later litigation. Burbadge, in an unfortunately mutilated document, appears to have alleged that Brayne acquired an interest by means of a promise, which he afterwards evaded, to leave it to his sister’s children.[1105] Robert Miles, of the George Inn, Whitechapel, a friend of Brayne, who supported and ultimately inherited the case of his widow, told a different story.[1106] He had heard Burbadge ‘earnestlie insynuate’ Brayne to join in the transaction, as one which ‘wold grow to ther contynual great profitt and commodytie’. Brayne was ‘verye loth to deale in the matter’, and complained later to Miles that it was ‘his vtter vndoing’, and that he would never have touched it, but for the ‘swete and contynuall’ persuasions of Burbadge. His brother-in-law had assured him that the cost of erecting the play-house would not exceed £200, and after it had already cost £500, urged that ‘it was no matter’, and that the profits ‘wold shortlie quyte the cost vnto them bothe’. Obviously Brayne was out for profits, and had to take his risks. But if the account of Miles is to be trusted, he had also definite grievances against his partner. Burbadge’s small contribution to the outlay was partly made in material, for which he overcharged at the rate of sixpence for a groat’s worth. When funds ran short, Brayne and his wife worked as labourers on the structure, while Burbadge, if he set his hand to a job, took the regular rate of wages for it. And there is some corroboration of a more serious charge of ‘indyrect dealing’, after the house was opened, about the ‘collecting of the money for the gallories’.[1107] Miles alleged that during a space of two years Burbadge used a secret key made by one Braye, a smith in Shoreditch, to filch from ‘the commen box where the money gathered at the said playes was putt in’, thus cheating ‘his fellowes the players’ as well as Brayne. He would also ‘thrust some of the money devident betwene him and his said ffellowes in his bosome or other where about his bodye’. The Theatre was in use by 1 August 1577, as it is mentioned by name in the Privy Council inhibition of that date.[1108] But it was opened before the work was completed, and the last stages were paid for out of the profits.[1109] Moreover, in addition to what Brayne and Burbadge could find, money had to be raised on mortgage, with the result that Brayne never got full security for his interest in the undertaking. He was not a party to the original lease, thinking that if a joint lease were entered into, the survivor would take all.[1110] When a draft assurance of a moiety of the profits to him was prepared on 9 August 1577, it could not be executed because the lease was at pawn, and ultimately, on 22 May 1578, Burbadge gave him a bond of £400 to assure in due course.[1111] An assurance was, however, never made. The friction between the partners led to violent disputes. On one occasion, after high words in a scrivener’s shop, ‘Burbage did there strike him with his fist and so they went together by the eares in somuch that this deponent could herdly part them’.[1112] On 12 July 1578 they submitted their differences to arbitrators, who decided that, with the exception of 10s. weekly for Brayne’s housekeeping and 8s. for Burbadge’s out of the profits of ‘such playes as should be playd there vpon Sundaies’, the first charge upon the rents and profits of the property should be the repayment of debts due upon the theatre. Thereafter Brayne should take them ‘till he shuld be answered suche somes of money which he had lade out for and vpon the same Theatre more then the said Burbage had done’. And when this claim too was discharged, the rents and profits should ‘go in devydent equallye betwene them’. Should it be necessary to raise money on mortgage, it should be a joint mortgage, and its redemption would then come in as the first claim on the rents and profits. Burbadge gave Brayne a further bond of £200 for the keeping of this award.[1113] On 26 September 1579 a mortgage was in fact entered into for a loan of £125 from John Hyde, grocer, to be repaid in a year. The amount, however, was not forthcoming, and although Hyde made an arrangement to take £5 a week out of the profits, he only got it for four or five weeks. In June 1582 he arrested Burbadge and got £20 out of him. Shortly afterwards he claimed forfeiture of the lease, and as Burbadge warned him that Brayne ‘wold catch what he cold’, appointed one of his own servants with Burbadge ‘to gather vp v^li wekely during the tyme of playes’. In this way he got back another £20 or £30. There was, however, still at least £30 outstanding when Brayne died in August 1586.[1114] His widow Margaret claimed a moiety of the interest under the lease as his heir. At first, we hear, Burbadge allowed her ‘half of the profittes of the gallaries’, but only so long as she could lay out money ‘to the necessary vse of the said playe howsse’, and when she had so spent £30, he said that he must take all the profits until the debts were paid, made her gather as a servant, and finally thrust her out altogether.[1115] Meanwhile Hyde was getting impatient for his money. He had promised Mrs. Brayne that, if he were satisfied, he would reassure the lease to her and Burbadge jointly, but not to either party separately. But now he said that he must convey it to whichever would pay him first, and being approached through Walter Cope, the master of Burbadge’s son Cuthbert, he did in fact, on some promise that Mrs. Brayne should not be wronged, take his £30 and make over the lease to Cuthbert Burbadge on 7 June 1589.[1116] Henceforward Cuthbert, and not his father, was the ostensible tenant of the property. This transaction stimulated Mrs. Brayne to assert her claims. About a year before the Burbadges had brought an action against her in Chancery, apparently in the hope of enforcing the alleged promise of Brayne to leave his interest to his sister’s children; and she now retorted with a counteraction against James and Cuthbert, in which she claimed to have an assignment of a moiety of the lease.[1117] Her chief witness was the Robert Miles on whose statements this narrative has already drawn. He was not of unimpeachable reputation. His long association with Brayne had ended in a quarrel. Brayne had ‘charged Miles with his deathe, by certaine stripes geven him by Miles’. The widow had accused him before the coroner and procured his indictment as ‘a comon barreter’. Afterwards they had become friends, and he was now maintaining Mrs. Brayne in her suit.[1118] Much of his evidence, however, received corroboration from his son Ralph, from William Nicoll, a notary who had prepared the deeds connected with the partnership, and from Edward Collins, who had acquired Brayne’s grocery business in Bucklersbury. Burbadge, on the other hand, relied largely on one Henry Bett, who had had an opportunity of perusing Mrs. Brayne’s papers, and had then transferred his services to the other side. We cannot perhaps assume that all the evidence in the cross-suits is preserved. So far as what we have goes, there seems to have been no attempt on Burbadge’s part to defend himself against the charge of indirect dealing during the early years of partnership. Nor were the main facts as to the history of the lease much in dispute. The chief issue was as to Mrs. Brayne’s equitable claim to an interest in it, and this of course turned largely on the state of the account between Brayne and Burbadge at the death of the former. Miles asserted that the expenditure on the building of the Theatre in cash and credit had been practically all Brayne’s, that he had started as a rich man, but had had to sell his lease and stock in Bucklersbury and pawn his own wardrobe and his wife’s to get the work finished, that he was ruined, and that Mrs. Brayne was now ‘vtterlye vndone’ by the suit, and owed 500 marks to her friends.[1119] On the other side it was claimed that Brayne’s wealth, variously reputed at from £500 to £1,000, had been exaggerated, that he was already involved when he took the Theatre in hand, and that his downfall was largely due to unfortunate investments outside the partnership, especially in a soap-making business carried on with Miles at the George, where in fact Burbadge had incurred losses in helping him.[1120] Bett, moreover, said that, while Brayne ‘would never plainlie declare’ what his profits on the Theatre had been, ‘yt seemed by his taulke, that he had gayned and receyved a grete deale of monye, more than he had disbursed’.[1121] The actual figures produced in the course of the case, which are sufficient to enable us to arrive at a fair estimate of the main position, do not quite bear out this suggestion. Towards the original outlay Burbadge seems to have found about £50; Brayne as much and £239 more, which he claimed as due to him from the partnership. In addition there were outside debts outstanding at the time of his death to the amount of at least £220. Something, moreover, had already been spent out of takings before 1586 in payments on Hyde’s mortgage. So that we may perhaps reasonably accept the total cost of the building as being somewhere about the 1,000 marks (£666) at which common repute estimated it.[1122] A certain amount of building material, worth perhaps 100 marks, was still in hand. All that Brayne could be shown to have received as against his considerable outlay was a sum of £135 1s., for which his receipt was produced. What Burbadge had received it is difficult to say. A comparison of various estimates suggests that after Brayne’s death it may have been between £100 and £200 a year.[1123] On the other hand, he had paid off the debt of £220 which Brayne had left outstanding. And throughout he had been responsible, without aid from Brayne, for certain outgoings independent of the structure of the Theatre, for which he was entitled to claim credit. He had paid £230 in rent and laid out at least £220 in putting the tenements in order, as well as at least £30 early in 1592 on the repair of the Theatre itself.[1124]

The fortunes of the case in Chancery were various. In 1590 the Court seemed inclined to grant a sequestration of half the profits; but instead made an order that the arbitrament of 1578 should be observed.[1125] On the strength of this Mrs. Brayne and Miles came to the Theatre on more than one occasion, and claimed to appoint collectors, including one Nicholas Bishop, who was asked to stand ‘at the door that goeth vppe to the gallaries of the said Theater to take and receyve for the vse of the said Margarett half the money that shuld be gyven to come vppe into the said gallaries at that door’. They were, however, refused access, and on 16 November 1590 there was a row royal, of which independent witness was borne by John Alleyn, of the Admiral’s men, who were then playing at the Theatre. James Burbadge, ‘looking out at a wyndoe vpon them’, joined his wife in reviling them as a murdering knave and whore, and expressed his contempt for the order of Chancery; Cuthbert, who came home in the middle of the fray, backed him up; while Richard Burbadge, the youngest son, snatched up a broom-staff, and as he afterwards boasted, paid Robert Miles his moiety with a beating. He also threatened Nicholas Bishop, ‘scornfully and disdainfullye playing with this deponentes nose’. James said that at their next coming his sons should provide pistols charged with powder and hempseed to shoot them in the legs.[1126] Both Cuthbert and James were summoned on 28 November for contempt before the court, which instead of dealing with this charge proceeded to take the whole case into further consideration.[1127] This was something of a triumph for Burbadge, who continued to resist the order, and repeated with oaths that twenty contempts and as many injunctions would not force him to give up his property. This was heard by John Alleyn in the Theatre yard about May 1591, and about eight days later ‘in the Attyring housse or place where the players make them ready’, on the occasion of a dispute with the Admiral’s men about some of ‘the dyvydent money between him and them’ which he had detained, Burbadge was equally irreverent before Alleyn and James Tunstall about the Lord Admiral himself, saying ‘by a great othe, that he cared not for iij of the best lordes of them all’.[1128] Margaret Brayne died in 1593, leaving her estate to Miles, who thus became a principal in the suit.[1129] And on 28 May 1595 the court came to the decision that it could not entertain the case, until Miles had endeavoured to obtain relief at common law, by suing on the two bonds which Burbadge had given to Brayne in 1578.[1130] He does not seem to have thought it worth while to do this, probably because he saw very little chance of recovering money from James Burbadge, while Cuthbert, who now held the lease, was not a party to the bonds.[1131]

It is the personality of Burbadge rather than the conduct of the Theatre that these details illumine. But we may gather that the building was constructed mainly of timber with some ironwork, that it had a tiring-house and galleries, one at least of which was divided into upper rooms, where spectators could sit as well as stand, and that money was taken by appointed gatherers, placed in locked boxes, and subsequently shared out amongst those entitled to it.[1132] From other sources it appears that 1d. was charged for admission to the building and 1d. or 2d. more for a place in the galleries.[1133] Apparently the players took the entrance fee and the owners of the house the whole or an agreed proportion of the gallery money. In the winter of 1585 an interesting arrangement was entered into between Burbadge and Brayne on the one hand and Henry Lanman, owner of the neighbouring Curtain, on the other, by which during a period of seven years the Curtain was taken ‘as an Esore’ to the Theatre, and the profits of both houses pooled and equally divided between the two parties. This arrangement was still operative in 1592.[1134] Kiechel tells us that the number of galleries was three, and De Witt that the shape was that of an ‘amphitheatrum’.[1135] It is impossible to trace with any certainty the successive occupation of the Theatre by various companies of players or to reconstruct the list of plays produced upon the boards. Its occupants were Burbadge’s ‘fellows’ at the time of his frauds of 1576–8, and may reasonably be identified with Leicester’s, of whom he was certainly one in 1574.[1136] Stephen Gosson tells us in 1579 that amongst plays then ‘vsually brought in to the Theater’, were The Blacksmith’s Daughter and his own Catiline’s Conspiracies, and in 1582 assigns to the same house Lodge’s, if it was Lodge’s, Play of Plays and Pastimes given on the last 23 February, the play of The Fabii and possibly the history of Caesar and Pompey.[1137] Presumably The Fabii is The Four Sons of Fabius, presented by Warwick’s men at Court on 1 January 1580. Warwick’s men had therefore probably replaced Leicester’s at the Theatre, and it was the same men, then in the service of the Earl of Oxford, who were concerned in a riot at the Theatre on 10 April 1580.[1138] In 1582 came the controversy between Edmund Peckham and Giles Allen about the freehold of the Theatre site, as a result of which Burbadge was ‘disturbed and trobled in his possession’, and ‘the players for sooke the said Theater to his great losse’.[1139] So there was probably another change at this time. And in 1583 there was a complete reshuffling of all the London companies on the formation of the Queen’s men. Professor Wallace, who is primarily considering that part of the evidence which he has himself discovered, says that the Queen’s did not act at the Theatre.[1140] But most certainly they did. It is true that, when an inhibition against the Theatre and Curtain was obtained on 14 June 1584, the owner of the Theatre, ‘a stubburne fellow’, described himself as Lord Hunsdon’s man. Nevertheless the only companies named as concerned are the Queen’s and Arundel’s, and Burbadge may not himself have been then acting.[1141] And as to the presence of the Queen’s in the Theatre at some date there is no doubt. Tarlton is not traceable in any other company than the Queen’s, and it was at the Theatre that Tarlton made jests of Richard Harvey’s Astrological Discourse upon the Conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, published in 1583.[1142] The Queen’s certainly did not confine themselves to the Theatre; but that they were there again in 1589 may be inferred from a mock testament of Martin Marprelate in Martins Month’s Mind, in which he is made to admit that he learned his twittle tattles ... at the Theater of Lanam and his fellows’. A marginal note in the same pamphlet indicates that it was at the Theatre that the ‘Maygame’ representing the ‘launcing and worming’ of Martin was staged, and there is other evidence that Laneham, then one of the Queen’s men, was one of the players who took a part in the ribald controversy.[1143] Gabriel Harvey’s scoff at Lyly as ‘the Foolemaster of the Theatre’ may perhaps indicate his authorship of plays for the house. In 1590–1 it is clear that the Admiral’s men, probably already associated with Strange’s, were at the Theatre, and their quarrel with Burbadge doubtless led them to cross the river and join Henslowe at the Rose. After the reconstitution of the companies in 1594, James Burbadge’s son Richard became a leading member of the Chamberlain’s men, and it is probable that, when this company left the Rose about the middle of June, it was to the Theatre that they went. Here Hamlet, which certainly belonged to them, was being acted in 1596.[1144] It must be added that the Theatre was not strictly reserved for the purposes of the legitimate drama. It was built for ‘activities’, amongst other things, according to Stowe, and prizes of the School of Defence were played at it between 1578 and 1585.[1145] On 22 February 1582, there took place at the Theatre ‘a scurvie play set oot al by one virgin, which there proved a fyemarten without voice, so that we stayed not the matter’.[1146]